Now that I've delurked, I'm free to ask every stupid and uninformed question I've had this year. Lucky for you all!

First time in a H2H BB league with some buddies, been playing fantasy hockey and football with them for years. I'm in largely because they were struggling to find guys this year (and summer used to be my one break from staring at statracker all night), and as it is, we've only got 8 teams. We've tried to deal with this in part by having only one bench spot (beyond 9 hitters and 2 SP, 2 RP, and 2 P). and only one DL. Having no frame of reference, I'm just curious what's typical.

The league is obviously very shallow, and at any given time, there may be 5 to 10 guys on the WW who clearly should be on a roster, but you can't afford to pick anyone up in most cases unless you are definitely going to play him over someone already active -- and odds are you're dropping someone else fairly talented. Adds an interesting and sometimes frustrating wrinkle to dealing with fairly stacked teams.

I am in a somewhat similar situation. We had a large league (14ish) in years past but some of the managers moved, got married, had work to do etc. and now we are down to 7.

I decided that the way to make the league competitive was to essentially double the rosters. (so the WW plays like 12 team league). IMO you need to expand the rosters when you have a small league, otherwise you run into having damn good players out there...

in this league I have 2DL spots and a total of 5 bench spots.

Give a man a fish and he'll eat for a day, teach a man to fish and he'll drown because you forgot to teach him to swim.
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matmat wrote:I decided that the way to make the league competitive was to essentially double the rosters. (so the WW plays like 12 team league). IMO you need to expand the rosters when you have a small league, otherwise you run into having damn good players out there...

There are great players out there. But we thought it would be better to force people to make pretty fine discriminations among the top tier players, rather than expand the benches and possibly really upset the balance of power -- for example, there were five of us "at" the live draft and 3 who auto-drafted. Bigger benches, the five of us could have really padded our roster with players we thought the auto-drafters would prefer to their own picks, but doing so would have meant seriously disrupting our own roster. Same thing with call-ups, guys coming back from injury, etc -- they don't necessarily go to the guy who just happens to be online the most because you dont' have any sort of real back-end players you can readily drop. I know most of the guys really agonize over their waiver wire moves.

I see what you're saying though, and would be curious how that's played out. I would love to expand our rosters, one bench slot does indeed drive me nuts.

I would like to have at least 2-3 bench spots, but it does add a unique wrinkle to the league. I think you almost have to have more than one unless you have very short waver times and such because if a player goes down you have to wait for him to clear waivers before you can add him to your active roster rather than just swap him from the bench to an active roster spot. Just my $.02.

In my 12 team H2H league, we have 6 bench spots and none for the DL. I am hoping we exapnd to 8 next season, so we shall see. That will give more room to take chances on youngsters, thus rewarding those of us that actually pay attention. To the ones that dont, they wont care about missing out on players they have never heard of anyways <until it comes back to bite them in the ass, that is>